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Issue Event Seats to a Sponsor

Goal: Give a sponsor whose package includes seats at your gala a code their guests use to register — so those people go through the normal registration form and pay nothing, instead of you re-typing eight sets of details from an email thread.

When you'd use this​

A company buys your $10,000 Gold sponsorship. It includes a table of eight at the gala. The sponsorship is paid, but the eight people who will sit at that table still need to register: you need their names, emails, and meal choices, and they need confirmation emails and a check-in record.

Issuing seats hands the sponsor one code. Their guests register themselves at $0.

The short version​

  1. Open the sponsorship and go to the Benefits tab.
  2. Find the seats card at the top.
  3. Click Issue seats (on a benefit that's waiting for them) or Add registration seats (for anything else).
  4. Fill in the event, ticket type, and seat count.
  5. Enter the sponsor contact's email and click Issue.

The sponsor gets an email with the code and a link. You can copy either and send it yourself instead.

Nothing is issued automatically​

Omnivo never creates or emails a code on its own — not when a sponsorship is signed, not when a payment clears, not on a schedule. A code exists because a staff member decided to hand out seats.

That's deliberate. Codes issued automatically on a payment event get sent the moment an ACH transfer says "processing" — and then have to be chased down when the transfer fails a day later.

:::tip Not fully paid yet? The dialog warns you if the sponsorship isn't fully paid, but it won't stop you. A signed pledge or an invoice in the mail is often good enough, and you're better placed to judge that than a rule is. :::

This works on sponsorships you created years ago​

You do not need a specially configured package. Add registration seats appears on every sponsorship, whatever its package looks like — including pledges recorded long before this feature existed, and perks you agreed after the sponsorship was already sold.

If the sponsorship already has a benefit like "Table of 8 at the gala" recorded as plain text, that benefit appears in the list with an Issue seats button. Attaching a code to it means the existing benefit row starts tracking claimed seats — you don't have to restructure anything historical.

Configuring it on the package (optional)​

If you sell the same seat benefit every year, you can describe it on the package so the issue form arrives pre-filled.

When editing a package benefit, set Benefit type to Event registration seats and enter how many seats it includes.

You choose the ticket type at issue time rather than here, because a package gets reused across events and each event has its own ticket types.

A configured benefit does not issue anything by itself. It just means the sponsorship page shows an actionable prompt with the seat count already filled in.

Watching the seats​

The seats card shows claimed of total, so two weeks out you can see that Acme has claimed 5 of 8 and give them a nudge.

The benefit's fulfillment record updates itself as guests register — no ticking things off by hand. It flips to complete when the last seat is claimed, and back to in-progress if a guest cancels and frees one.

Resend re-sends the email for the same code. It never mints a second code — that would quietly double the seats the sponsor was promised.

Cancelling a sponsorship​

Cancelling a sponsorship revokes its codes immediately. That matters: a shared code may have travelled a lot further than the person you sent it to.

Guests who already registered keep their registrations. They were invited in good faith and may have booked travel; absorbing those seats is better than cancelling people. Only the unclaimed seats go away, and they return to the event's available capacity.

Deleting a sponsorship outright — the option for one recorded in error — revokes its codes as well. If any of its seats have already been claimed, Omnivo will refuse the delete and ask you to cancel instead, the same way it does for a sponsorship with a recorded payment. Those guests are real registrations, and deleting the sponsorship would erase the only record of why they were comped.

Where the money lands​

A comped seat doesn't generate a tax receipt and doesn't add to the event's fundraising total, because that money was already recognized when the sponsorship was paid. Receipting the seats again would count the same benefit twice.

Make sure the package benefit carries a fair market value — that's what reduces the sponsor's deductible amount on their acknowledgment letter.

If the sponsor would rather name their guests​

Some sponsors don't want to forward a code — they have a list and want each person emailed directly. They can do that themselves from the same page, and see who has replied. See Naming Guests for Sponsor Seats.